Choosing a page namespace for Internationalizing DebianWiki : This page attempts to list various problematics and constraints to be taken into account before choosing a namespace... This should help choose the best solution.

Is it easy to identify what's the subject of a page, according to it's title ? SupportFrench and InstallDebian.pl are prone to confusion), as opposed to fr.wiki.debian.org/Support or pl/!?InstallDebian.

Clear page language (#IdLang)

Is it easy to identify what's the of a language ? A French visitor couldn't guess if he should click on Support or Assistance to get the French version (since both words are synonyms)...

Linking translated pages (#OtherLng)

Make it easy to find the same page in other languages.(moinmoin don't have a feature to automatically connect/link localized versions of a page).

Moinmoin CamelCase linking (#MmLnk)

Does Moinmoin create link automatically ? page containing a slash ("/") or a period (".") doesn't work, like InstallDebian/French or InstallDebian.fr . However, single word are never converted as links by moinmoin, so it's not really an issue since editors have to write ["Foo"] anyway... they can write ["fr/Foo"] too.

Country code collision (#IsoColl)

.pl can be the short for perl files or polish translations.

Language name collision (#LangColl)

Some language may be spelled the same way in their local language (?).

Translated word collision (#WrdColl)

The word Installation is the same in French and English. not to mention that nouns, projects name , brands, technologies aren't translated : Debian, DebianInstaller, iSCSI, HP.

Problem mapping pages(#Map)

It should be easy to find the different versions/languages of a page, in case link is missing.

Page not translated

When a page isn't translated, the visitor should be presented the English version.

Alternatives with Transalated pages names

The following are various alternatives for translation page names for a sample 'Hardware' page, where the page title is translated.

wiki.debian.org/Materiel

Cons:

Subject collision : The same word can be used for different subject in different languages

Language collision : two language can use the same word.

Difficult to guess the page language (see point above).

Difficult to list other languages-version of a given page.

Difficult to present English page if {lang} doesn't exist.

Pros:

Easy to search information for non-english people

wiki.debian.org/fr/Matériel

Cons:

High maintenance cost : It's Difficult to list other languages-version of a given page : Renaming pages should be handled with care to avoid orphan. Also, one shouldn't forget to create stub English page.

non-ascii caracters may get broken because of characters encoding and conversion in URL, MUA, IRC (ISO-8859-* ; UTF-8).

Another issue is that the translated word may not carry the exactly same meaning as the original. So the contents of the pages may tend to "fork" (like "What is Debian" and "About Debian").

wiki.debian.org/DebFrHardware

Possible Tricks

The following tricks can be used to improve Alternatives with English pages names proposals.

wiki.debian.org/fr/Materiel stub

Create linker to help non-english people to find article by title search tool?

(optional) To help user that doesn't speak English, you can create a linker page named "Initial of language" + "/" + "PageInNativeLanguage". This page redirect to the English page with the content #redirect "Language" + "/"+ "NameOfReferentPage"

It should be possible to implement this feature in Moinmoin itself. Moinmoin would do something similar to FullSearchCached, but it would also fetch the page header's #language xx and display the matching language name (rather than the page name).

Automatic Prefix/suffix pages (#i18nPrefix)

For fr.wiki.debian.org, wiki.debian.org/fr/* and wiki.debian.org/*.fr schemes, It's possible to automatically list alternates languages (by adding a prefix or suffix to the current page name)..

with #wiki.debian.org/Hardware.fr It's should be possible to detect "broken link"/"missing page". for all schme, detecting "broken link"/"missing page" would require serious Moinmoin patching. It's probably not a goos idea, unless the patch is included upstream.

it might also be possible to redirect (or present) the English version, when localized version is missing. again, this would involve serious Moinmoin modification.